TV Capture / Personal video recorders

[RichardD]

Hello all

Have recently upgraded the PC and am after making it a bit more useful. Having a V8 w/e jobbie to feed I'd rather not upgrade the telly to widescreen or replace the old VHS video which has lost its Nicam recording ability. Hence am looking into extras for the PC.

Anyone any experiences of:-

PINNACLE - PCTV MEDIACENTRE 100e or
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250

http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/pages/products/data_pvr250.html

??

From what have read these seem the most suitable for recording unattended direct from PC. Have been advised that hardware MPEG-2 is useful to have.

Find the Hauppauge range quite confusing, think this is the most suitable model. Have also got freeview with an olde Pace lump, guessing can access this from PC, although it won't be able to change channels...

[charlie sprout]

Hi Richard,
Have a look at these www.nebula-electronics.com/index.asp I bought one a few months ago and am very happy with it.
cheers

[rebelstar]

It just so happens I bought a Hauppauge 350 yesterday (with a view to building my own multimedia center, TV, PVR, radio, mp3s... lots of stuff).

I already had a very cheap TV card without onboard MPEG-2 encoding, and the machine it was in (500Mhz) simply wasn't fast enough to encode video and write it to disk at the same time.

If you don't need the radio, you can save a few quid and get the 250 instead of the 350.

I also saw PC world were selling some kind of box which also decoded freeview signals... you might find that more useful as I imagine that will let you change channels.

[RichardD]

Thanks for info / comments.

The DigiTV from Nebula certainly looks the business (HDTV ready etc, be able to ditch my old pace receiver), excellent info on the website.

One final question, does the EPG (electronic program guide) require a subscription (as in £)? A friend seems to think so, although I can't see anything to suggest this..

[Alex]

I have a PVR250 in my box and it works well. The supplied software is a bit clunky though.

[charlie sprout]

RichardD said:

One final question, does the EPG (electronic program guide) require a subscription (as in £)? A friend seems to think so, although I can't see anything to suggest this..

The real time EPG is free. There is an option to 'download' a copy of the EPG that has never worked for me. Another plus for Nebular is that they have a constant program of updates for the cards (fixes and improvements).

[johnp68]

Wouldn't touch the Pinnacle one with a barge pole. Bought a card a couple of months ago and have now given up and removed it from the PC. It's slow, crashes and if you update to the latest version of their software it no longer scans through the digital channels automatically (a known bug, which is not mentioned on the official update site). If you still need convincing then have a search through Pinnacle's own user forum on their website and you'll quickly find that lots of people are having problems. Complete waste of £50 or whatever it cost me!